Google Calendar has been trolling me for the past six months. Not a week has gone by in which Google Calendar - ostensibly trying to be helpful - has not reminded me of some upcoming event that I had entered into my calendar myself...and which did not occur due to the deadly global pandemic that has constricted and narrowed our lives since March. Reminder: you are traveling to New York for an exciting professional conference. No, Google Calendar, I am not on my way to New York today. Reminder, you are traveling out of state to officiate a wedding. No, Google Calendar, I am not traveling out of state to officiate a wedding. Most poignant were the reminders I received from Google about canceled flights to Israel that my family had booked just a few weeks before the outbreak of the COVID - 19 pandemic.
These alerts were reminders of a future that had been diverted. In recalling their cancelation, the meetings and the flights and the celebrations I was hoping to attend, became recurrent reminders of the truly tragic losses of this season. A canceled conference is sad, but, tragically. some 200,000 Americans have died in this pandemic and that number includes beloved friends and relatives of so many of us. There is pain in our community for those of us missing beloved friends and relatives this holiday who were alive and well last Rosh Hashanah. And there is widespread pain among those of us celebrating Rosh Hashanah apart from our parents, children, grandparents, or grandchildren this year.
Covid has undermined our control over time. Our long-term plans that we made last year come back to mock us and who dares to make long term plans now? Covid has undermined our control over the world. I used to fly to New York for a conference and return home the same day, sometimes multiple times in one week. Tens of thousands of airplanes transporting millions of passengers made the world smaller every year. For less than the price of an average month’s rent, anyone with an American passport could reach almost any city on the planet within 24 hours.
We are, each of us, products of the modern world and we have assumptions about the world that are distinct from the assumptions that framed how our ancestors experienced the world. Long term plans for weeks, months, and even years into the future is prudent and rewarding. The earth is smaller every year as culture and commerce connect us ever more quickly to ever more people in ever more corners of the world. This was the world we inhabited just six months ago.
The covid 19 pandemic has reminded us that the assumptions and worldview of modern life are the products of very specific and very rare circumstances. Penicillin was discovered less than 100 years ago and first used among a civilian population to cure disease in 1942. Only then and for the first time have doctors had a reliable tool to cure deadly infections.. The past three generations of human history have unfolded with the beautiful illusion that illness and disease will not constrain our mastery over our own lives.
This was the world we inhabited just six months ago.
And it is so easy to slide into Rosh Hashanah this year in a state of deep sadness over how much we have lost in the past year and how many we have lost in the past year and who we have lost in the past year. But Rosh Hashanah is not a melancholy day. It is a serious day. It is a day of awe - but it is not a day devoted to looking backwards in sadness. Rosh Hashanah is a day devoted to looking forward with hope.
The Torah calls Rosh Hashanah “Yom HaZikaron” a memorial day. And that identity of Rosh Hashanah is reflected in the Zichronot section of the Mussaf prayer. But the memories in Zichronot, the memories that define Rosh Hashanah as Yom HaZikaron, are not human memories. They are God’s memories. God remembered our ancestors in good times and in hard times and God recalls each and every one of us on Rosh Hashanah. And the scriptural verses in the machzor tell us that God’s memory is a necessary ingredient in both private and communal redemption. God’s memory doesn’t lead to melancholy or nostalgia or sadness, but rather it leads to hope in the coming redemption.
God’s memory, unlike human memory, is not a reaction to forgetfulness - God does not forget. God’s memory is an act of recalling the full human potential of the one being remembered. And that perspective is redemptive.
And so I have hope this Rosh Hashanah. Amidst the sadness and amidst the fear and amidst the anxiety - I feel hope this Rosh Hashanah. As the machzor says, the God who remembered Noah on the ark and the God who remembered Sarah and the God who remembered our ancestors' loving devotion in the desert, will remember us too. And I believe that we not only have a reason to be hopeful despite the suffering we have experienced, but that we have a reason to be hopeful because of what we have learned through our suffering.
Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of creation, and specifically, the anniversary of the creation of the first people as told in Genesis, in Sefer Bereishit. But Sefer Bereishit tells the story of creation twice. And from the earliest generations, Torah scholars have tried to make sense of these two stories and understand their differences. Is the second chapter in Bereishit a more detailed description of the story that is told in general terms in the first chapter? Does the first chapter describe a theoretical act of creation, rooted in order and strict justice and the second chapter describe the world that was actually created and sustained through Divine mercy? Or, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik suggested, do the two chapters in Genesis and the different stories they tell reflect “a real contradiction in the nature of man.”
In his classic 1965 essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith”, Rabbi Soloveitchik, the rabbinic figure who, perhaps more than any other figure of his generation, grappled with the state of the soul under conditions of modern life, sketches two paradigmatic origin stories for humanity which he traces back to the person of Adam as he is described in Bereishit chapter 1 and Bereishit chapter 2. These archetypes are called “Adam I and Adam II.”
Adam I, as portrayed in Bereishit chapter 1 is created on Rosh Hashanah, male and female together - like every other animal described in the Torah and given a blessing and a mandate:
Adam II, as portrayed in Bereishit chapter 2 is created on Rosh Hashanah all alone. He meets his fitting partner only after experiencing great loneliness. His blessing and his mandate from God are quite different:
Adam I, according to Rav Soloveitchik’s description, is the origin-story for modern technological civilization. Science and medicine and engineering and government are all products of our ability to fulfill our mandate וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ - we fill the globe with other people and we subdue the forces of nature to meet our needs. In this way, modern men and women are more successfully living up to our mission as human beings than our ancestors. In Rav Soloveitchik’s words:
Man of old who could not fight disease and succumbed in multitudes to yellow fever or any other plague with degrading helplessness could not lay claim to dignity. Only the man who builds hospitals, discovers therapeutic techniques and saves lives is blessed with dignity. Man of the 17th or 18th centuries who needed several days to travel from Boston to New York was less dignified than modern man who attempts to conquer space, boards a plane at New York Airport at midnight and takes several hours later a leisurely walk along the streets of London. (p. 14).
In contrast, Adam II, is devoted to the mission לְעָבְדָ֖הּ וּלְשָׁמְרָֽהּ - tending and protecting the world as God created it. We seek God’s presence and yearn for relationship with God from within the world, as it has been created, without the need to analyze the world, or to transform the world, or to subdue the world.
Male and female human beings, created together in Bereishit 1 set up a paradigm for all human relationships. No different than the other animals, our relationships with one another, whether they are marriages or friendships or communities or nations, are entirely pragmatic and transactional.
In Bereishit 2, Adam is created alone. Unlike every other creature he experiences profound loneliness until he is introduced to his fitting helpmate. This is an alternative paradigm for all human relationships. Marriages, friendships, communities, and even nations can be formed to relieve loneliness, to find companionship, and to build a community of faith and meaning.
In the past six months, the accomplishments of Adam I have been stripped away. Our travel and ability to be with one another is circumscribed. The happy illusion that we could set personal goals and plan for the future without fear of illness or catastrophe has vanished. In the words of Jeremiah, which are echoed on Kol Nidre night: we are like a clump of clay in the hands of the potter. God chooses who and when and how to lift up and who and how and when to push down.
We are praying for the success of Adam I. The men and women who are developing rapid covid testing, the teachers learning how to become effective online pedagogues, the vaccine researchers, and the public health professionals weighing and evaluating risks are all acting to fulfill the mandate given to humanity in Bereisthit chapter 1: וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ
And Adam I will be victorious. We were created with the mandate and the potential to control the world, to make the earth respond to our needs so that human beings can live lives of dignity. But until then, we have a chance, in the midst of horrific suffering, to remember, on Yom HaZikaron, some important things about ourselves.
Human beings are also the descendants of Adam II. Back in 1965 Rav Soloveitchik felt that “lonely people of faith” those few religious men and women who yearned to feel God’s presence and yearned for closeness with God, were the only ones left who remembered that Adam II is part of our spiritual DNA. But that knowledge is available to all of us now.
We now understand if we did not before that the triumphs of Adam I over nature are ultimately fleeting. Even when modern technological civilization is most successful, we were always vulnerable to illness. And we have experienced the isolation of Adam II. The pragmatic relationships of mutual accomplishment and reciprocal exploitation can only take us so far. We crave the relationships that emerge from individuals looking, not to complete a task together, but to overcome loneliness and to form a community.
The possibility exists this Rosh Hashanah that we remember each other as God remembers us. We can recognize that we are each the descendants of Adam I and Adam II and therefore celebrate and promote one another’s dignity while also celebrating and honoring one another’s uniqueness. This is a redemptive possibility and it gives me hope this Rosh Hashanah.
With God’s help, and through the dedication of so many physicians and nurses and educators and food service workers, and others we are rebuilding our society. And our shul community is rebuilding too. Our daily minyan is as reliable as it ever was and we show up for tefilah to accomplish things we could not do alone. But I am hopeful this Rosh Hashanah because of the possibility that as a religious community we will remember that we are also the sons and daughters of Adam II. We don’t just join together with others to accomplish things, but to overcome loneliness through experiencing transcendent moments together..
And I am hopeful that this redemptive memory in which we recall one another and the fullness of our humanity can expand beyond our community and bring deep and enduring redemption to the world.
I am speaking now in an empty shul. I look out across the empty chairs and I can remember your faces and your smiles. I look around me on the bimah and I remember your children laughing as they sang Adon Olam and lined up for lollipops. Let’s take our memories of all that we enjoyed about our lives together and all of our canceled plans, and let’s join those memories with all that we now know want to plan, and use them to build a transformed future.
Shanah Tovah.